Saving My Daughter, a.k.a. Double Kidnapped (Feifer Worldwide, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Ironically, after the driven-to-formula aspects of Driven to Kill Lifetime showed one of their very best recent movies, Saving My Daughter, shot under the working title Double Kidnapped and a taut, suspenseful thriller that for its first two-thirds is an effective whodunit until the culprit is revealed. The auspices on this one weren’t good: the executive producers were Tom Berry and Pierre David and the producer-director was Michael Feifer, who’s concocted some of the most bizarrely melodramatic movies ever made even by Lifetime standards. At least this time he let someone else, Michael Perronne, write the script, and Perronne obliged with the tight-knit tale of a woman, Joanna Kennedy (Alicia Leigh Willis), whose daughter Chloe was kidnapped 15 years earlier at age three when the two were out shopping and Joanna had briefly left Chloe on a park bench with a back sculpted to look like a butterfly. (Feifer, ordinarily a pretty slovenly director, carefully uses that butterfly back in Joanna’s flashback memories as a symbol of innocence lost.) When the film opens Chloe, who was recovered alive and well by the police six months after she was taken, is 18 and a senior in high school. Unfortunately, Brittany Maxwell (a nice hard-girl performance by Laurie Fortier), Chloe’s original kidnapper, has just served her sentence and is about to be released from prison on the 15th anniversary of the kidnapping – and Joanna learns this when she gets a heads-up phone call from Detective Chen (Vickie Eng), who worked the original case.

Joanna and her husband Tyler (Robert Pralgo, uncharismatic but appropriately stolid in the manner of Lifetime’s “good” husbands) are next-door neighbors of Mandy (Ashley Jones), who’s locked in an abusive relationship with Craig (Drew Waters). He regularly stays out all night and beats her when he is home – she makes the usual pathetic excuses for him but both the Kennedys and Craig and Mandy’s son Kyle (Sam Ashby) all know what’s going on – and they’ve broken up a few times but Mandy has always let him move back in with her and resume their sick relationship. Then Chloe disappears again and Joanna becomes a powerful revenge-driven character, hysterically looking for anyone who might have taken her daughter on the 15th anniversary of her original kidnapping. There’s no shortage of suspects, including Brittany Maxwell, Kyle – he’s obviously in unrequited love with Chloe and one can tell he’s jealous when she goes off with a racially ambiguous fellow student, Xavier Lopez (Amar Stewat) and skips school for the day, even though he has a sort-of girlfriend of his own, Ella (Aislyn Freya Pax). Summoning her husband Tyler back from a business trip, Joanna insists on investigating the case herself after Detective Chen informs her that the police can’t take a missing-persons report on Chloe until she’s been gone three days, since she’s legally an adult. (The story is set in Houston; I’d always assumed you could file a missing-persons report on someone after they’ve been gone just one day, but maybe the law in Texas is different from what it is in California.)

She traces Brittany Maxwell’s sister Lisa (Tuesday Beebe), who works as a waitress in a diner, via an article on the kidnapping based on an interview she gave to a tabloid because she needed the money (and kudos to the casting director: Laurie Fortier and Tuesday Beebe look enough alike we can believe in them as sisters). She breaks into the halfway house where Brittany has been living since she got out of prison, and is nearly arrested herself when the people running the house report her to the police. Later she has a chance to interview Brittany and finds out that the reason she kidnapped Chloe in the first place was she had just lost her own daughter and grabbed Chloe as a potential replacement – giving her a multidimensionality and an aspect of pathos rare in Lifetime scripts, especially ones Christine Conradt didn’t write. Joanna also traces Xavier Lopez to the coffeehouse where he works as a barista, and finds that after their Ferris Bueller-style “day off” from school he dropped her off at home and has no idea what happened to her after that. Joanna also gets a hostage video from Chloe saying that she’s fine and she just wants to get away from her parents, maybe go to New York – only Joanna is suspicious because the one time Chloe was in New York (at age six, with her parents) someone stole her purse and she never wanted to go back there again. Meanwhile we’ve got to see Chloe herself being held captive in an out-of-the-way mountain cabin (not another out-of-the-way mountain cabin in a Lifetime movie!), though we don’t learn by whom until two-thirds of the way through the movie.

We’ve also seen a couple of insert shots of Mandy’s abusive husband Craig – or at least of his corpse: one with a knife through his chest and a later one showing just an arm, though it has body hair so we can tell it’s male – and we get the Big Revelation [spoiler alert!] when a person holding a gun enters the cabin where Chloe is being held. At first we see only their legs, clad in construction-style work pants, and the gun; but then we hear the figure address Chloe and we hear a woman’s voice. Then the camera pulls back and we see Chloe’s new kidnapper is Mandy, who has been posing as Joanna’s concerned friend supporting her through the disappearance of her daughter. It seems that Mandy finally had enough of Craig’s assaults and stabbed him to death with a knife when he was about to kill her, but since she’d withdrawn her domestic-violence complaints against him instead of following through on them, she decided the police would never believe her if she reported the killing and claimed self-defense. Alas, just then Chloe walked in on the scene and Mandy enlisted her help in transporting Craig’s body from their home, where she killed him, to the mountain cabin – and then Mandy freaked, decided she couldn’t trust Chloe not to report her to the police, and locked her up in the cabin’s basement. Joanna gets the clue she needs to find her daughter when she shows Chloe’s hostage video to Kyle, who recognizes an old clock in the background and thereby realizes it was shot at his family’s old cabin. She drives out there with Kyle – she has to bring him along because he knows where the cabin is and she doesn’t – and her husband Tyler follows behind them.

Joanna still doesn’t suspect her lifelong friend Mandy is the culprit – she thinks it’s someone, maybe Craig, maybe a stranger, having commandeered this place to use it as a hideout to stash Chloe – and so she’s startled when she sees Mandy on the front porch, waving a gun around and saying she didn’t want it to end like this but she’ll kill as many people as she has to in order to preserve her secret. Only she draws back from killing her own son, and that gives Joanna the chance to rush her as They Both Reach for the Gun, it goes off while they’re wrestling for it and Mandy is killed when it goes off. Though Saving My Daughter is a bit of a let-down after Mandy is revealed as the villain, it does reflect Michael Feifer’s love of stories in which people the innocent protagonist has known for years suddenly develop or reveal a dark side, and the ending is a powerful conclusion that draws on Lifetime tropes but also powerfully “spins” them in different directions. It’s an exciting suspense tale with genuinely complicated characters – the idea that a woman could be psychologically twisted in this direction after suffering years of abuse from a man she literally can’t live with and can’t live without – the sort of diamond-in-the-rough we hope for from Lifetime but seldom get, and a real surprise coming from an ordinarily mediocre filmmaker like Michael Feifer.